Comment by bri3d | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bri3d | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think this comment is accurate based on the article, although you cite personal experience elsewhere so maybe your project wasn't the one that's documented here?

> What Google is doing is using the huge chillers that would normally be cooling the air in the facility to cool water which is directly pumped into every server.

From the article:

> CDUs exchange heat between coolant liquid and the facility-level water supply.

Also, I know from attaching them at some point that plenty of mainframes used this exact same approach (water to water exchange with facility water), not water to air to water like you describe in this comment and others, so I think you may have just not had experience there? https://www.electronics-cooling.com/2005/08/liquid-cooling-i... contains a diagram in Figure 1 of this exact CDU architecture, which it claims was in use in mainframes dating back to 1965 (!).

I also don't think "This eliminates ANY air based transfer besides the chiller tower." is strictly true; looking at the photo of the sled in the article, there are fans. The TPUs are cooled by the liquid loop but the ancillaries are still air cooled. This is typical for water cooling systems in my experience; while I wouldn't be surprised to be wrong (it sure would be more efficient, I'd think!), I've never seen a water cooling system which successfully works without forced air, because there are just too many ancillary components of varying shapes to successfully design a PCB-waterblock combination which does not also demand forced air cooling.

> > CDUs exchange heat between coolant liquid and the facility-level water supply.

Oh interesting I missed that when I went through in the first pass. (I think I space bared to pass the image and managed to skip the entire paragraph in between the two images so that’s on me.

I was running off an informal discussion I had with a hardware ops person several years ago where he mentioned a push to unify cooling and eliminate thermal transfer points since they were one of the major elements of inefficiency in modern cooling solutions. By missing that as I browsed through it I think I leaned too heavily on my assumptions without realizing it!

Also, not all chips can be liquid cooled so there will always be an element of air cooling so the fans and stuff are still there for the “everything else” cases and I doubt anybody will really eliminate that effectively. The comment you quoted was mostly directed towards the idea that Cray-1 had liquid cooling, it did, but it transferred to air outside of the server which was an extremely common model for most older mainframe setups. It was rare for the heat to be kept liquid along the whole path.

The CDUs are essentially just passive water to water heat exchangers with some fancy electronics attached. You want to run a different chemical mix outside to the chillers as you do on the internal loop, it also helps regulate flow/pressure and leak detection with auto cutoff is all fairly essential.

Running direct on facility water would made day to day operations and maintenance a total pain.

    > not all chips can be
    > liquid cooled.

Why not? It's just a heatsink except with water running through cavities within it, instead of a fan sitting on top of the heatsink.

One of the biggest problems with water cooling, especially on boards that weren’t designed for it, can be passive components which don’t usually have a heatsink and therefore don’t offer a good surface for a water block, but end up in a thermal design which requires airflow - resistors and FETs are common culprits here. Commodity assemblies are also a big problem, with SFPs being a huge pain point in designs I’ve seen.

The problem is often exacerbated on PCBs designed for air cooling where the clearance between water cooled and air cooled components is not high enough to fit a water block. Usually the solution when design allows is to segment these components into a separate air cooled portion of the design, which is what Google look to have done on these TPU sleds (the last ~third of the assembly looks like it’s actively air cooled by the usual array of rackmount fans).

Indeed, and the problem is once you've committed to fans and liquid cooling you can reduce the complexity and plate size massively by just cooling the big wins (CPU/GPU). I've actually seen setups where they only cold plate the GPU and leave the CPU and it's entire motherboard on air cooling.

Messy.

I wonder if you could just put a conventional heatsink in there to cool the air inside the box?

You would have a liquid block on the CPU but you'd also have a heat sink on top that transfers heat from the air to the coolant block, working in reverse compared to normal air cooling heatsinks. The temperature difference would cause passive air circulation and the liquid cooling would now cool both the CPU and the air in the box, without fans.

Seems like something someone would have thought about and tested already though.

Not really practical it wouldn't transfer much energy at all. Let's say that your coolant comes in at 30 degrees c, well if your air is 40° and you've got no fans you can do the maths but it may as well be 0.

I was imagining the coolant comes in at a lower temp like 20 and maybe keeps the air from going above 40.

It doesn't have to do that much, but maybe you're right. I'm sure they'd be doing this if it was practical, being able to onit thousands of fans would probably save a pretty penny both on hardware and electricity.

If you're blasting enough air around to cool a 600W GPU, you don't care if your GPU's power connector dissipates 10W under certain circumstances - the massive airflow will take care of it.

Take that airflow away and you have to be a good deal more careful with your connector selection, quality control and usability or you'll risk melted connectors.

Water-cooling connectors and cables isn't common, outside of things like 250kW EV chargers.

It's exactly those kind of problems (though these systems will be SXM like).

It's interesting because I've never seen mainframes do water to water (though I'm sure that was possible).

The only ones I've ever seen do water to compressor (then gas to the outdoor condenser, obviously)

Most ES/9000 series and earlier stuff had water to water SKUs. I remember seeing an installation with one that exchanged heat into a facility loop which went through another water to water exchanger to a pond-fountain chiller system.

Starting with S/390 G4 they did a weird thing where the internals were cooled by refrigeration but the standard SKUs actually had the condenser in the bottom of the cabinet and they required raised floor cooling.

They brought water to air back with the later zSeries, but the standard SKUs mimicked the S/390 strategy with raised floor. I guess you could buy a z196 or a ec12 with a water to water cabinet but I too have never seen one.

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